Official Bloodlines items are not currently sold on the Second Life Marketplace. The only items that Liquid Designs currently sells on the marketplace are Crypt items, and can be found here. An old copied version of the Thirst is currently being sold on the marketplace for L$850. It is a deactivated copy, and will not work. Do not buy it! You can buy official Bloodlines items in the stores on the following regions: Liquid Designs, Liquid East, Liquid Badlands, Liquid South, and Liquid Frontier.

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We’re currently working on updates to the war items, and on the community features that we mentioned in the meetings over the last two weeks, so we won’t be holding office hours tomorrow afternoon. However, we hope to pick up office hours again next week at Liquid Frontier. In the meantime, you can contact us directly in-world with any questions you have.

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A few months ago, Second Life changed the way new avatar names are selected. Avatars select a ‘user name’ when signing up, then can select a different ‘display name’ that’s shown in world. Everyone who signed up before this new system was implemented has a ‘legacy name’, or a name with a traditional first and last name, and a user name of firstname.lastname. The ‘legacy name’ of new residents is their user name as the first name, and the last name ‘Resident’. Bloodlines currently uses legacy names for everyone, so all new players have the last name ‘Resident’ on the website. We realize the need to update the system in order to adapt to this new change, and we wanted to present some possible options for how we could address the problem and solicit feedback from everyone. Please post comments on this post with your feedback and concerns.

First, we wanted to say that while it’s possible for us to update the HUDs to collect current display names and display them on your profiles, because display names are subject to change, we won’t be using display names in any official sense. That is, you couldn’t set someone as your liege by using their display name, or transfer a soul by referring to that soul’s current display name. We need to stick to a naming system that doesn’t change.

The first possibility that we see in addressing this is just to filter out the last name ‘Resident’, and your name in Bloodlines will just become your Second Life user name. Names that show up on profiles and in the stats, including in bite lists, minion lists, and soul lists would all just be the avatar’s single user name.

The second possibility is to allow all new residents with the last name ‘Resident’ to choose a last name to use just for Bloodlines, so their first name would be their second life user name, and their last name would be their chosen Bloodlines last name. We could either set this up so that there is a limited number of possible Bloodlines last names, or just let people choose whatever last name they want. I think if we chose this option, we would have to have a way to indicate whether a name is a Second Life legacy name, like “Lyle Maeterlinck”, or whether a name is a Bloodlines name, like if someone named “Lyle Resident” made the Bloodlines name “Lyle Vampiros”. Also, if we did this option, we would have to find a way to ensure that no ‘Bloodlines name’ was the same as any existing Second Life legacy name, so that “Lyle Resident” would not be able to choose “Lyle Maeterlinck” as their Bloodlines name. This might be an argument for restricting possible Bloodlines last names to a list of names that don’t overlap with any Second Life legacy names, to prevent any possible confusion.

We would like to address the possibility of “gaming” the lethality ranking in Bloodlines War. It’s possible to gather many alts around a mine, and blow them up to artificially increase 1-hit kills. We are considering updating the lethality algorithm to put less weight on 1-hit kills from mines, and more weight on 1-hit kills achieved with other weapons, and we wanted to see what everyone thinks of this. Please leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

We had originally announced that these products would be released yesterday, but we ran into some unexpected problems that we needed to take some extra time to fix. We thank you for your patience with us.

We also released an update to the Thirst and Rage HUDs yesterday. If you’re using the 3.2 or before, we will not be able to send you an auto-update, because we had to disable the auto-update server for that item due to counterfeiting. If you have the 3.3, you should receive an auto-update when you wear your HUD. If you don’t, please send a notecard to Lyle Maeterlinck, and include your transaction history if possible. I will get you an updated HUD as soon as possible.

The major change to the HUDs is the Charisma feature. Charisma is a measure of influence. There are four products that can send Charisma: The Thirst, The Rage, the Lumen Bond, and the Blood Bond. If you own all four products, you can send up to four Charisma points per day. However, with the Blood Bond and the Lumen Bond, you can only send Charisma points to your bonded partner.

We hope you get a great deal of enjoyment out of these products. Thanks to everyone for your support, suggestions, and encouragement!

Get ready – this Saturday, we’re unveiling a new Bloodlines metric to strive for, and 3 exciting new items.

The new metric is Charisma, and it will be an indicator of influence. It won’t be based on current stats: everyone will start from zero. As time passes, the most influential players will be revealed. This addition will include an update to both the Thirst and the Rage HUDs. This new metric will not affect any of the current rankings in Bloodlines.

The new items are:

The Blood Bond / The Lumen Bond: This item is a partnering Bond that will link you through Vital Blood or Lumens to another player. In addition to the symbolic bonding in SL and on the web profile, there are game perks for the bonded players.

The Coffin / The Sarcophagus: In addition to being functional prim furniture with animations, this item will allow you to transfer blood or lumens instantly to anyone, even if they’re offline.

The Blood Scan / The Lumen Scan: This scanner provides a web-based clan management system that will help you keep tabs on your minions and your souls and help you track your progress over time. Scan for Minions in need of blood, liege changes, and more.

We get a lot of questions about deactivated blood containers and lumen prisms, so here is some information that will help you understand why your container might be deactivated, and what to do about it.

When a container is deactivated, it means that it may still exist in-world, but will not work. The serial number of that container is marked as deactivated, so any container with that serial number will no longer work. We deactivate containers for several reasons: sometimes when we close a bloodlines account, we deactivate the containers on that account so they can no longer be used. Sometimes, when someone accidentally breaks their container by pulling the script out of it, or a container gets mangled by a Second Life error, we’ll deactivate that container and replace it. On rare occasions, containers fail to register with our system when they’re first rezzed by the vendors, and in this case, we replace them, but the non-activated version will still exist in the purchaser’s inventory.

Also, it’s still possible to copy no-copy items in Second Life through sim rollbacks, where a sim is rolled back to a previous state, when an item was rezzed, from a present state where the item exists in inventory. Since only the sim is rolled back and not your inventory, the item now exists in two places, and you have two copies of the same container. However, both of these containers will have the same serial number, so it’s not as if you have twice as much blood. There is still the same amount of blood, it can just be accessed through two different containers now. So, if you drink from one copy of a copied container, you’re drinking from all of them. There happens to be a certain 15L tank that’s been deliberately copied thousands of times and handed out to thousands of people. We deactivated this container a long time ago, but people continue to hand out non-working copies of it, and I still get questions every day about why a 15L tank that someone got “as a gift” won’t work. It won’t work because we deactivated it, because it’s a copied container.

Here is a procedure to follow if you get your hands on a deactivated container:

Did you buy it directly from the Bloodlines store, and are you the first owner of this container? IM Lyle Maeterlinck, and he will replace it for you.

Did you get it from a friend as a gift? Ask your friend about it.

Did you purchase it from a blood tank reseller? You might have just gotten taken advantage of, but there’s a chance the seller didn’t know it was deleted. Contact the person you bought it from, tell them it’s deactivated, and hope that they’ll give you a refund or a replacement. But, this would never happen to you, because you follow our procedure of how to buy an aftermarket blood container and would never, ever, buy a blood container without testing it and being certain that it works first, right?

Any time you buy a container from a reseller, we can’t guarantee that container. You have to seek a guarantee from the seller. Here’s why: even if you follow our procedure, and the container you’re buying works, there’s no way for you to know if there’s another copy of that container floating around out there, because copying exploits still exist. If this is the case, there’s a chance that this container will be eventually deactivated as a copy. There is a low chance of this happening, but it is still a risk you should be aware of when buying a blood or lumen container. The only way you’ll get a risk-free guarantee from us is if you buy them from us. If you want a risk-free guarantee and you want to buy from a reseller, you have to get their risk-free guarantee. To buy from us, use the rez vendors in the Bloodlines Thirst Store on Liquid Designs or Liquid East, or the rez vendors in the Bloodlines Rage store on Liquid South.